


Watershed Moments

by kirazi



Category: Rivers of London
Genre: F/M, Found Family, M/M, Multi, Sort Of, casefic, in-law problems, water infrastructure
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-18
Updated: 2019-12-18
Packaged: 2021-02-26 06:14:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,130
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21844996
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kirazi/pseuds/kirazi
Summary: Look, I’m not saying it was a bright idea to start shit with a river. But in my defense, a) I’d had a pretty rough year, and b) I didn’t actuallystartit, no matter what Lady Ty says.(Peter Grant is on leave, but that doesn't mean he's leaving well enough alone.)
Relationships: Beverley Brook/Peter Grant, hints of potential Beverley Brook/Peter Grant/Thomas Nightingale
Comments: 26
Kudos: 131
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	Watershed Moments

**Author's Note:**

  * For [20thcenturyvole](https://archiveofourown.org/users/20thcenturyvole/gifts).



> This story is set around the end of _Lies Sleeping_ , after the main denouement and Peter's suspension, but before the final scene where the news that Bev and Peter are expecting is revealed. It can be read as consistent with that timeline, or as a branching-off point to another one. Also, I started writing this before learning about the Water Weed comic, which I haven't read, so this may be at odds with canon revealed there regarding certain characters.

Look, I’m not saying it was a bright idea to start shit with a river. Especially a teenage one in a stroppy mood. One of the first things you figure out, as a probationary constable fresh from Hendon, is that getting into a battle of wills with a dumb kid never ends well, even if it ends with them in cuffs. Especially if the dumb kid is a minor goddess, and your not-quite-sister-in-law.

In my defense, a) I’d had a pretty rough year, and b) I didn’t actually _start_ it, no matter what Lady Ty says. I was just trying to do my girlfriend a favour, and as it happened, I had a lot of time on my hands—being suspended pending results of an IPCC investigation has a way of leaving you at loose ends. All the more so when the investigation would like to know how, exactly, a criminal mastermind (and evil wizard) ended up with a bullet in the head, handcuffed to the cop who’d been trying to nick him, while said cop’s ex-partner-turned-renegade made a clean escape despite a months-long manhunt. Or womanhunt, I suppose I should say. We're big on gender-sensitive terminology, these days, even if gender-sensitive policing is still mostly a figment of the bureaucratic imagination. I probably shouldn't be saying we, just now. _We who?_

So. It was about a month and a half after the end of Operation Jennifer—a debacle even by what Seawoll likes to call “your admittedly unique standards, Grant"—and I’d caught up on all the sleep I'd been missing, established a routine at the gym near Bev’s house—all that shiny, modern equipment made for a striking change from the antiquated gentlemen’s boxing gear in the Folly—and was meekly attending weekly therapy, which I don’t like to talk about but have to admit was helping, a little. The weird, slightly agitated fog that was the predictable psychological result (or so my therapist tells me) of being kidnapped, held prisoner, injured, and betrayed—again—by someone I’d still, despite everything, thought of as a friend, was starting to lift at last. I didn’t really know what to do with myself, though. The investigation was likely to take months, and I couldn’t return to duty until it was over—maybe ever, if the outcome wasn't the one I was hoping for. Helping Nightingale hammer the basics of the forms and wisdoms into Patrick Gale and his merry band of Tory dilettantes turned would-be practitioners once a fortnight wasn’t keeping me particularly busy. My mum pointed out that I could always take up cleaning work again. Me, I was thinking more along the lines of an architecture course, maybe even redoing my A-levels with an eye to applying to university in the event that I found myself permanently exiled from the Met. 

It was Bev who decided to put me to use investigating her sister’s problems. We were making dinner at her place, and I may have been moping just a little. The thing was, I missed the Folly, more than I'd have expected. Oh, I liked living with Bev—it was actually going a lot more smoothly than I’d expected, seeing as none of my previous relationships had ever made it to the cohabitation stage. It was...nice, to wake up and share a bleary-eyed pot of coffee in the morning, snuggling, before she headed off to classes, and to make dinner together in the evenings like this, like a normal couple. I was starting to think cozy domesticity was something I could be _good_ at. And, of course, it was more than nice to be sharing her bed every night, not just when I could get away. But I found myself, weirdly, longing for the hushed, wood-panelled atmosphere of the magical library, for my safe hideaway in the tech cave, even for Molly’s rib-sticking meals, which are like a real-life version of one of those telly programs where some poor punter tries to roleplay the Victorian past and ends up weeping over an Aga and a pile of suet. I missed Nightingale, too—we saw each other at the Tory dilettante training sessions, and he’d taken me out to the pub once or twice afterwards, insisting on some “gentlemen’s refreshment,” which actually meant a rigorous exchange of information from the loops I was officially out of over a pint or two, plus a quiz on the homework he’d set me to do while on leave. But I missed seeing him peer over his newspaper at breakfast, missed working with him, missed the well-run machine we’d set humming over the past few years together. It weirded me out, a little—like I’d become just a bit too comfortable in the role of apprentice—or maybe that was just Lesley's voice, echoing in my head. Surely it had to be just a little bit pathological, to feel wistful for the company of your governor. I should probably mention it to the therapist.

“Chelsea’s acting weird,” Bev told me that evening, while I sliced okra and tried not to get too much of the goo on my hands.

“Someone inform the Beeb's breaking news desk,” I said. Of Bev’s assorted siblings, not to mention her further-flung relatives, Chelsea and Olympia—better known to history and hydrology as the Westbourne and Counter’s Creek, respectively—are probably the ones that I get on with the least well. I mean, Lady Ty and I aren’t friends, but I like to think we’ve established a functional working relationship, and a degree of mutual respect. But the twins are the sort of mouthy teens who host raves and dabble in officially illegal substances and generally make me feel like a nerdy cop headed for the wrong side of thirty, which technically, I am, but it’s no joy to be reminded of the fact.

Bev rolled her eyes at me, which she has even more regular opportunity to do these days. “Not like herself,” she clarified, taking a sip from her beer, while I admired the smooth line of her neck as she swallowed, and the little hollow between her collarbones, and thought of better things to talk about. "It's like she's changed personalities overnight," she added.

“And your mum’s not offering up a crate of Star and thanking the ancestors?” I inquired. I get the impression that Mama Thames is even less amused by her daughters’ antics than I am, though she'd never say so to my face.

“Mum doesn’t know yet," Bev said, biting her lip, which is the point I clocked that she actually seemed concerned, and started feel guilty for being an arsehole about it. I’m an only child, but lord knows I can sympathize with the desire not to inform your immigrant parent about their offspring’s potential misbehavior unless you’re certain it’s a matter of life or death. “I don’t want to rat out Chels if she’s just doing kid stuff, having fun—but Olympia says they’re barely talking now"—Olympia, to my profound surprise, is doing a course in archaeology at a redbrick uni up North—"and that's the _really_ weird part. I'm not surprised she's not telling me what she's up to, but if she's not telling Oli, well—" she shrugged.

“Hmm,” I said, doing my best to sound noncommittal. I was starting to have a bad feeling about this.

“I was thinking you might look into it,” Bev continued, and I sighed. 

“I’m on leave,” I reminded her. “I am technically allowed nowhere near police business.”

“Nothing says it’s police business,” she said. “But it might be a matter for the Isaacs.”

“It’s not like the two are easily separated,” I told her. Technically, if magic is involved and it may lead to a breach of the peace, it’s a Falcon issue. Getting on the wrong side of a river is definitely the kind of thing that can lead to some peace-breaching—ask me how I know—and I doubted that the Met would appreciate any freelancing by disgraced detective constables. Bev gave me a pleading look, though, and I crumbled like wet sand. It’s very effective when she does that thing with her eyes and the corner of her mouth turning down. And she knows it. You think I'd mind, more, but I guess that's why they call it being in love.

“All right,” I said. “But this had better not be a repeat of the thing last March. If so, I’m grassing 'em to the governor.” Back in the spring, just as Operation Jennifer was heating up, Chelsea and Olympia had decided to fuck with the Oxford-Cambridge Boat Race, for a lark—a lark that involved multiple potential Olympic athletes, a nationally-televised event, and several hundred thousand mostly-drunk spectators on the riverbank. Nightingale had been displeased, and not just because Oxford had lost by a half-length, which he seemed to take as a personal insult. I was going continue detailing exactly how effectively that bullshit had ruined one of my last free weekends before all hell broke loose, but Bev just smiled, and leaned in for a kiss, and somehow I lost the train of thought for the time being.

It was back on my mind three days later, though, when I finally tracked Chelsea down in a courtyard near her eponymous barracks—mid-Victorian brick infantry housing now under development by Qatari billionaires, presumably destined to become high-end luxury flats for the grandchildren of the officer class that once led all those dead soldiers to their ignominious deaths in some foreign field. Or the grandchildren of the native potentates they were deposing. She looked out of place—not so much because of her colour, since the inhabitants of SW1 now include enough of the international ultra-rich to increase the melanin quotient a bit—but because her usual streetwear and trainers stood out among the posh cashmere-and-Chanel-wearing Sloane set that otherwise populated the pavements, with the occasional cluster of abaya-clad women bearing Fendi totes mixed in.

“Hey, Chels,” I greeted her, and she turned towards me, unsurprised. Her eyes were glassy, like the sky reflected in calm water, and her movements were unusually sluggish—which was a tell; all of the rivers tend to move with a fast, fluid kind of grace, even Mama Thames, whose figure would put a Neolithic fertility goddess to shame.

“Fuck off, Starling,” she said, the words stretched into an odd drawl. "You're on the wrong side of the river." She giggled, then, and flipped a middle finger at me—she probably hadn't forgotten my reaction to the boat race debacle—but her head lolled to the side, and her slim dark hands were shaking. It almost seemed like she was on gear, but her face and hair were clean, and her sleeveless tube top made it clear there were no track marks on her arms—although it’s not like I don’t know well that they can be hidden in less obvious places. Her bare skin had a strange shimmer to it, like she was wearing body glitter or something—but it's hard to tell, with the rivers. They're good at conjuring up glamours of more than one kind.

I couldn’t get much sense out of her, and gave up before long—"fly away back to your master now," she said, with another giggle, turning away—but it was enough to be certain Bev was right, something was off, more than the usual youthful obnoxiousness I'd expect, as either a cop or as her sister's naff boyfriend. My phone buzzed, then, and out of instinctive habit I checked the text straightaway (Sahra inviting us to a pub quiz double-date with her and Michael). When I looked up again, she was gone. Fuck. Well, this was definitely worth looking into further—although maybe not as a Falcon case just yet, because as soon as I made it one, it would be out of my hands.

My first thought, under the circumstances, was that if Chelsea wasn’t just high on some unknown substance, she might be feeling the effect of some other kind of water-spirit—not a fellow genii locurum, but some minor creature (or infestation thereof) trespassing on her manor. By force of habit I almost headed back to the Folly to check the library, before realizing I couldn’t do that just now. So on my way back south, I resorted to what the training manual calls "judicious and limited use of civilian informants." I rang Abigail with instructions to look up anything she could find on kelpies, each-uisges, grindylows, tangies, nuggies, nixies, and undines, plus rusalkas and veelas for good measure—it’s always wise to take into account modern migration patterns—and drafted an email to Harold Postmartin on my phone while I waited for my takeaway order at the Nando’s down the road.

But when I told Bev what I'd been thinking, she shook her head. “If some kind of creature were up in the water, we’d know about it,” she told me.

"What about some creature _out_ of the water?" I asked. "Any hints of a new boyfriend? I don't think Reynard's sniffing around London anymore, but what if some other fae-adjacent loser is in the picture?" 

She frowned. "I don't think so," she said. "Also, I'm pretty sure it would be a new girlfriend you'd be looking for, if that were the case."

"Ah," I said, and decided not to inquire as to whether her mother was aware of that, although I kept it in mind for next time someone decided to bring up Bev's choice in partners at a family gathering.

So I resorted to hypothesis B: contaminants. “Could someone be putting something in the water?” I asked. “Not just your standard urban pollution, something else. I mean, you always see those clickbait stories about cocaine in the Thames eels, and antibiotics in the water table—wasn’t it all that industrial effluent that drove Father Thames past Tedlington Lock in the first place?”

Bev snorted. “Or the riff-raff trickling in from the darker parts of the Empire.” She’d had a crash course with the UKIP-voting hordes during the year she spent as a sort of ceremonial hostage upstream, and she still brings up my role in brokering that agreement when she wants to win an argument.

“You know what I mean,” I told her.

Bev shrugged. “Ty says the water is cleaner than it’s been in generations,” she pointed out.

“Tyburn’s full of shit,” I said. “Literally.”

Bev made a face. “Easy for you to say. It’s not like _we_ decided to build a combined sewer system and then fuck all the rainfall patterns by dumping a few millennia's worth of carbon into the air in two centuries. Anyway, Bazalgette did the best he could, under the circumstances." We'd had this discussion before.

"Still," I said. "She was acting like she was on something. Assuming it wasn't a controlled substance she took herself"—because the usual substances don't seem to affect them in any lasting way, as Bev enjoys lording over me when I've got a particularly nasty hangover—"what are the remaining possibilities?"

She looked thoughtful. "There's a lot of construction under and around the central rivers," she said. "Not just the usual renovations, but the Tideway Tunnel work too." The Thames Tideway Tunnel is a massive project to build a 25-kilometre tunnel that will capture all the sewage and stormwater that currently flows into the Thames. Lady Ty played a major role in shepherding it through the recent approval process; I have no doubt she’s suborned half of the Planning Inspectorate.

"Could that be messing with her flow?" I asked. 

Bev shrugged. "We'd be aware of any permit-authorized works," she said. "But I suppose something unauthorized could be affecting her supply. I just don't know what."

“You’re the one getting a degree in conservation ecology,” I reminded her. My only official higher education consists of thirteen weeks at Hendon, although the half-decade of wizard school probably ought to count for something too.

So we agreed to divide the inquiry—don’t say the Met hasn’t taught me to appreciate the value of teamwork. Bev said she’d take the science, and I agreed to take the engineering—or rather, the infrastructure. Easier said than done. Allison, my contact at Thames Water, still wasn’t speaking to me after what happened last time. So I took a more creative approach.

In fact, I took a walking tour. I started with the official, mostly aboveground one—The Lost Rivers of London, it was called—and did a reasonably good job of keeping my mouth shut as a spotty postgrad guided me, three middle-aged white guys, and a Japanese tourist along the aboveground track of the Westbourne. We started with a stroll around the Serpentine, followed the course of the hidden river through Knightsbridge, saw the conduit that carries the waters over the underground tracks at Sloane Square, stood around peering at a lot of gratings (beyond which we could hear the telltale sound of moving water) and ended up on Chelsea embankment, clinbing down to the riverbank to see the arched tunnel where what’s left of the Westbourne flows out to join the Thames proper.

Afterwards, the rest of them headed to the pub, while I cried off and loitered around the riverbank until the water traffic thinned enough that I figured I wouldn't be noticed, and ducked down and strolled right into the tunnel. There was a steel grate a few metres up, but impello made quick work of the lock, and soon I was walking a narrow brick ledge above the waters of the Westbourne proper, wishing I hadn’t lost my high waders after that incident with the offering to Lady Ty. I wasn’t that far along before I saw the strange, pallid light, and hastily thumbed off my mobile in case whatever was going on down here blew the circuits. It gets expensive, and I can’t put replacements on the Falcon budget just now. But aside from the vestigia in the stone and brick of the walls—and there was a lot, plus that distinct earthen tang that told me the Quiet People had played a part in the construction here—I couldn’t figure out what was causing the faint glow that limned the narrow, slimy walkway, and seemed to shimmer in the murky water.

I palmed the stone walls again, and caught an echo of something—a sharp chemical smell, and a noise like small glass vials breaking. And then I heard an unpleasant gurgling sound and decided to get the fuck out, given what had happened last time I got in the way of a water event underground. On the way out, my headlamp caught a glint of something abandoned in the muck on the ledge. I thought it was a syringe, at first, but up close, it turned out to be a test tube. I didn't have an evidence collection kit on me, but I was wearing gloves, so I wrapped it in a napkin from my pocket and carried it out with me, catching another pulse of that vestigia on my way.

I rang Bev as soon as I got to the surface, but I got her voicemail, so I left a long message, and headed home to take a long shower. Afterwards, having spent most of the shower debating it, I sent Nightingale a text—I figured this was potentially relevant enough to share with him, but probably low enough on our well-honed mutual urgency scale to use a medium he could ignore if he wanted to, while pretending it was just technological ineptitude. The thing is, I really wanted to see him, but I didn't want to, like, make him feel obligated to drop whatever he was doing and attend to his disgraced apprentice. By that point, Bev was still nowhere to be found, and I was starting to feel ridiculously lonely and sorry for myself. So I played video games until I feel asleep, and woke to a text from Nightingale—Molly’s been teaching him, I think—telling me to meet him at the embankment in the morning, followed by about five texts from Bev saying the same thing. I had the faint, disturbing impression that they might just have been coordinating behind my back, there. 

I arrived just after he did, but before I'd made any real headway with my account of the evidence, Bev turned up with a sheepish-looking thirtysomething white guy, with disheveled hair and a better pair of wellies than mine, in tow—and the key to the whole case. Turned out he was a postgrad student in engineering at Imperial College, and the source of the bioluminescent nanobots— _the fuck was this_ , another Star Trek reboot?—that were causing the weird glow in the tunnel. (I felt a little better when Bev admitted it was my mention of the body glitter—as well as the test tube I'd found—that had pointed her in the right direction.) 

Nightingale looked even more confused than I was by our mad scientist's earnest, sweaty-palmed explanation of the unauthorized experiment he’d been carrying out. “It’s a bioremediation project,” he said, defensively. Apparently he’d been trying to clean up the river. Mama Thames might have appreciated the favor, if he hadn’t almost poisoned one of her offspring in the process. No one managed to explain why the critters he released were affecting the place-magic that animates a genius loci, but in exchange for a promise to quit introducing experimental substances without prior authorization, Nightingale and I managed to wrangle access to his data out of him—maybe Abdul-Walid or Jennifer would manage to make sense of it. Later, Nightingale told me, he suspected our errant bioengineer might be an unknowing member of the demi-monde—which would explain some of it, anyway.

In the meantime, though, the first priority was to clean up _his_ mess. Or rather, secure a perimeter and relocate all sensitive electronics while Nightingale—for once—did the janitorial work. It was another eighteenth, or twentieth-order spell—something that actually filtered the tiny buggers from the water molecules around them, like a whale straining plankton from the ocean. You’d think I’d be used to it by now, but it’s amazing every time—watching him stretch out a hand and rewrite the laws of nature, without even rumpling his well-cut suit or putting his tie askew. The awe, or something, must have shown on my face, because Bev rolled her eyes, while watching me watch him.

“What,” I said, suspiciously.

“You,” she said. “It’s like watching a puppy wag its tail.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I told her, even though I kind of did, and wasn’t sure I wanted to go there.

“I don’t mind,” she said, a gleam of amusement lighting up her whole face. “It’s kind of hot, actually.”

I blinked.

“It’s on you to sort it out, though,” she told me. “He’s not _my_ governor.”

“Right now he’s not mine either,” I said, my mouth three steps ahead of my brain. Not for the first time.

Bev’s dimples sprang into view. “Then you’ll have to work fast,” she told me.

It's a strange, potent thing, being granted a river's blessing. As it happened, Chelsea woke up from her nanobot-induced spell with the riverine equivalent of a truly nasty hangover, and promptly flooded three-quarters of the basements in Belgravia—you wouldn’t believe how many Russian oligarchs have underground swimming pools these days—and caused the solar-powered boat in the Serpentine to capsize for an encore, which is how I ended up handcuffing her to an iron railing in Hyde Park and ensuring that we’d likely be spending the holidays with my side of the family this year. So I had my hands full for the next couple of days, not least with the prospect of a river's curse. But I was going to need someone to pull rank and explain why a technically suspended detective constable was still carrying Met-issue handcuffs, let alone using them on a furious young woman who was loudly claiming to be underage to any spectators in earshot, and, well, another thing you learn in this line of work is that you may as well kill two birds with one stone. Because I'd been thinking quite a lot about what Bev had said to me that morning on Chelsea's banks, and again, in more emphatic detail, that night. So I leaned against a park railing, scrolling through my mobile until I found Nightingale's number, and hit _call_. I generally pride myself on working well, you see, but just this once, I was feeling blessed enough to give working fast a try.

**Author's Note:**

> Dear Yuletide recipient: I hope this lives up to expectations! I didn't think I could pull off Bev's POV, so I stuck with Peter's, but I tried to work in most of your other requests. Thank you for prompting me and giving me the chance to try writing in this fandom!


End file.
